Map Viewer - A Mapping Tool for Mobile Robotics

Map Viewer is an application for working with maps of an environment, primarily for use with robotics research.  Map Viewer runs on M$ Windows (and will run on some versions of WINE on Linux), and can edit maps from most of the major robot simulators including:

• ActivMedia's Saphira
• Carnegie Mellon's CARMEN
• BeeSoft
• Player/Stage
• Rossum (Mapviewer 2.1 and later only)

It works with both bitmap-like grid maps and vector maps, the two most common map types used in robotic simulators.  Map Viewer can also import and export image types Jpeg, Bmp and Pnm files, converting them into an occupancy grid map.

Other features of Map Viewer include:

• Generate Voronoi diagram of an occupancy grid, defining all the paths in the map that maximise the robot's distance from all obstacles
• Generate a paramaterised path using a modified A-Star algorithm between two points in the map.
• Average a grid map with another map.
• Perform five comparison benchmark techniques to compare one grid map to another. 
• Generate a configuration space (C-Space) on a grid map
• Convert an Occupancy Grid Map into a Vector map using two different line-fitting algorithms.  This is useful, for example, if you have architectural drawings of an environment you'd like to turn into a vector map to load into your robot simulator.
• Threshold map to values 0 and 1
• Smooth the grid map
• Build grid maps from sonar data
• Adding robots to maps (useful especially for Saphira, Player/Stage and Rossum users)
• Exporting vector maps to the Rossum Floor Plan format.
• Load/Save files in the Player/Stage format.
• Randomly generate any number of new maps, which can be saved in any of the supported formats.
• Generate Delaunay triangulations of grid points.
  

MapViewer is free to download and use, though if you feel an urge to fire off a big congratulatory email, feel free to do so.

A large amount of the code used in Map Viewer has been released by me as open source.  The Library page has more details.

To download MapViewer 2.2, click HERE.

To download MapViewer 2.3 click HERE.  This release is based on a complete rewrite of the base code. This was necessary in order to separate the code out into a separate library for the MapManager open source project.  As such, there may still be some bugs that are not present in version 2.2.  In addition to the features in version 2.2, this release can generate Delaunay triagulations of a set of points.  Last updated July 14th 2005. NOTE THAT MAPVIEWER 2.3 HAS A BUG WITH PLAYER/STAGE MAPS, SO USE VERSION 2.2 UNTIL THIS IS FIXED.

To download a zip file containing example maps in Mapviewer, Carmen and Saphira format, click HERE.

You can also download sets of randomly generated maps for three simulators, Player/Stage, Saphira and Rossum.  Each zip file contains 50 maps generated with the same specification for a single simulator.

Randomly Generated Maps
File Name	Simulator	Number of Rooms	Avg Room Area (Metres sq)	Number of Robots
Stage_1Room_500Msq_5Robots_50Maps.zip	Player/Stage	1	500	5
Stage_5Rooms_100Msq_5Robots_50Maps.zip	Player/Stage	5	100	5
Stage_100Rooms_150Msq_100Robots_50Maps.zip	Player/Stage	100	150	100
Saphira_1Room_500Msq_50Maps.zip	Saphira	1	500	1
Saphira_5Rooms_100Msq_50Maps.zip	Saphira	5	100	1
Saphira_100Rooms_150Msq_50Maps.zip	Saphira	100	150	1
Rossum_1Room_500Msq_5Robots_50Maps.zip	Rossum	1	500	5
Rossum_5Rooms_100Msq_5Robots_50Maps.zip	Rossum	5	100	5
Rossum_100Rooms_150Msq_100Robots_50Maps.zip	Rossum	100	150	100

The help page is available HERE in Adobe PDF, or HERE in Microsoft Word, or HERE in HTML.
There are a set of tutorials on the use of MapViewer located HERE.  Tutorial 4 contains much new sample data for building grid maps from sonar data.